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Flipkart has pumped $28 million into the Walmart-owned fintech entity, PhonePe, in a fresh funding round, according to regulatory filings made in Singapore.
The investment comes after it raised Rs 585.66 crore from its Singapore-based holding entity four months ago.
The recent infusion of funds from Flipkart takes the total funding for PhonePe to $928 million till date, and the Flipkart marketplace to $1.88 billion.
The investment was made last week by Flipkart Pvt Ltd, PhonePe’s holding company, in which Walmart owns a majority stake.
Flipkart had also invested $56 million in its fintech arm last November.
PhonePe is planning to expand its portfolio by increasing its offerings across categories such as insurance and mutual funds, besides exploring newer categories for extending loans, according to previous reports.
The Bengaluru-based fintech entity is also mulling over the addition of more merchants/ partners for its ATM (cash withdrawal) services, to increase its offline reach.
PhonePe rolled out its ATM service in February across 5 lakh offline shops in 300 cities pan-India. It has said that it plans to roll out the service to 2 million shops by the year-end.
PhonePe’s competitors in the e-commerce space include Google Pay and Paytm. PhonePe competes with Paytm across most categories. It has 7.6-crore monthly active users, with 55 crore transactions carried out every month, according to reports.
The company’s annualised total payment value run rate is $170 billion. It earns revenue through transaction fees (and distribution charges) on products sold across the platform and advertisement revenues, among others.
PhonePe had recorded losses of Rs 1,907 crore during FY2019, according to an Entracker report. The company’s Chief Executive Officer, Sameer Nigam, recently said the company expected to turn profitable by 2022 and go public in 2023.
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